But so is everyone else who writes about technology. Most of us gravitate to writing about tech because we think it's cool. So we're starry-eyed, hoping that the shiny new technology that's unwrapped for us by the PR departments of tech companies really will be the next killer product. We're dreamers, but we gravitate from one shiny bauble of a dream to the next one, rarely looking back to see which baubles become treasures and what morphs into dross.

The science fiction writer, Theodore Sturgeon, who when confronted with the notion that 90% of science fiction is crud, famously replied that "90% of everything is crud." That little sound bite has become known as Sturgeon's Revelation. Case's corollary to Sturgeon's Revelation is that 90% of technology trend predictions are wrong. We're the first to admit that we can be wrong, too. So in the spirit of fun and mea culpa, we look at some trends that seemed very real a year ago. Note that these aren't all trends we predicted, but they were all written about by starry-eyed technology writers like us. Let's take a look at them, shall we?

They're wrong about GMAIL; it is the future; it's no so much the storage but the easiness of use and the powerful search which make it better than others

Sidney

29th December 2005 23:48

May be he did not invest in Google stock and pissed off on the great chance to make money, lots of money ;)

Rutar

30th December 2005 00:44

bad, really bad

Ok, BTX and HD media are failures, the first one being a major one.

Copy protection in is an older failure and it started with the M$ activation BS. The only one fooled thinking it would work are the companies.

Apple competitors?, Apple got a whole lot of bad press due to imploding screens and products that scratch if you huff at them. That did lose them customers as well as the factthat their system is so goddam proprietary (I still think M$ has sent them a team in exchange for the Office Beta developers they recieved). And there was the x5.

Gmail, it's just sad when you're too dumb to use it.

They even found something that failed and it was not easy to spot: SLI. It got overrun by the high speed of GPU development because by the time you can actually add a second card, a single card will beat your SLI array as it happend with the 6800 series. So it's just something for rich people.

Tithian

1st January 2006 10:46

Most of the people I know (myself included) use their Gmail account as their main e-mail account. It's almost never 'down', never runs out of space, and has a pretty good spam filter. I don't think it's a failure.

Regarding the iPod: it's still a rare sight in several parts of the world, such as Eastern Europe. I only know one person who has one, but dozens, who posess different players (iRiver, Nomad, etc.) Getting an iPod at a resonable price is impossible in my country.